Fall River incinerator won't likely be fired up anytime soon

Don’t expect to see smoke spewing from the old municipal incinerator again.

As questions have been raised about resurrecting the quiet beast amid concerns space in the landfill is rapidly vanishing, state environmental leaders said returning the incinerator to its inglorious past is an idea past its prime.

Don’t expect to see smoke spewing from the old municipal incinerator again.

As questions have been raised about resurrecting the quiet beast amid concerns space in the landfill is rapidly vanishing, state environmental leaders said returning the incinerator to its inglorious past is an idea past its prime.

“The city wouldn’t be able to start the incinerator up again under the current conditions,” Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Edmund Coletta said, citing an inability for the aging facility to meet air-quality standards that have been strengthened since the incinerator was taken off line in 2000.

Attempting to upgrade the facility would simply be a waste of money.

“If they thought about trying to take it down rebuild it, they wouldn’t even be able to do that because of the moratorium,” Coletta said.

DEP placed a moratorium on new municipal solid-waste combustion facilities in 1990. That decision was reaffirmed in 2000 and in 2010.

The incinerator has been in shutdown mode since June 2000, when the DEP determined the city was not meeting air-quality guidelines for cadmium and lead emissions. At that time, the shutdown was deemed temporary while city officials debated spending millions of dollars to retrofit the building into a waste-to-energy facility.

That closure followed a temporary shutdown from November 1998 to January 1999 to allow the city to rebuild one of the incinerators. That closure came after the DEP determined the incinerator emitted 12 times the allowable amount of cadmium and five times the amount of lead. At the time, the incinerator was burning 200 tons of garbage per day.

Until recently, when City Councilor Daniel Rego discussed reopening the incinerator to cope with the eventual closure of the city’s landfill, city officials had been focused on retrofitting the plant for other uses.

That effort began in January 2011, when Mayor Will Flanagan and Department of Community Maintenance Director Kenneth Pacheco announced the city signed a contract with a Providence firm to assess the cost of bringing down the 100-foot-tall smokestacks, removing related equipment and replacing the building’s roof.

Messages left with city officials regarding the outcome of that report were not returned last week.